Two assistant professors join the UCLA Joe C. Wen School of Nursing

The UCLA Joe C. Wen School of Nursing welcomes two new senate faculty members for the start of the 2025-2026 academic year; Dr. Sungwon Park and Dr. Joosun Shin. 

Sungwon Park, PhD, RN, joined UCLA after completing a postdoctoral fellowship with the prestigious Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan, where she also served as an assistant professor at their School of Nursing. Drawing on her seven years of clinical experience as an occupational health and community health nurse, Dr. Park's work focuses on metabolic syndrome management and prevention for working populations and community members. Specifically, her current research uses two objective measures—accelerometry and biomarkers—to improve physical activity and reduce sedentary behavior among populations at risk for metabolic syndrome. She received her PhD in Nursing from the University of Illinois Chicago after completing both her MSN and BSN at Ewha Womans University in South Korea

Joosun Shin, PhD, RN, AGACNP, joins the UCLA Joe C. Wen School of Nursing after completing a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a teaching and research affiliate of Harvard Medical School. Dr. Shin’s research focuses on precision health symptom science, specifically characterizing dyspnea (shortness of breath) throughout the lung cancer care continuum by using diverse big data sources, including electronic health records and large, longitudinal clinical datasets with multi-modal variables. Through a multi-modal, big data-driven approach that combines advanced statistical modeling, machine learning, and omics analytics, Dr. Shin aims to identify sociodemographic, clinical, physiological (including spirometry), molecular (omics), and imaging characteristics associated with dyspnea. Her long-term goal is to identify high-risk lung cancer patients who develop or experience worsening dyspnea after treatment so that clinicians can perform timely, targeted, and personalized interventions. An alumna of UCLA Nursing’s Adult-Gero Acute Care Nurse Practitioner-MSN program, Dr. Shin earned her BS in Nursing Science from Inha University in South Korea and completed her PhD in Nursing Science at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2024, Dr. Shin was nominated as an emerging dyspnea scientist by the International Dyspnea Society.